voila_la_scorie What if Rick Springfield decided that his brand of rock needed a harder edge to it? Harder rocking guitars and more solos but still keeping the pretty and nice boy voice? If you have already started thinking about Zoot’s cover of “Eleanor Rigby” from the early seventies (Rick Springfield was in that band – check out the video), then steer your thoughts instead to Toronto’s Santers, a hard rock band comprised of Rick and Mark Santers and Rick Lazaroff.

Their debut “Shot Down in Flames” with the title track dedicated to Bon Scott hit record stores in 1981 and packed a hard rock sound with Rick Santers’ more early 80’s mainstream rock vocal style. If they had added some synthesizer they could have been ahead of the game.

The music is quite simply electric guitar with power chords and distortion, bass and drums. Rick Santers puts a bit of bite in his vocal style at times but he never sounds snarly or street-toughened. There’s no denying that the music is meant to be hard rock with some great riffs and pretty cool hard rock solos. Some songs are closer to the party rock sound, like “You Turn Me On” and “Points of Resistance”. Other songs like they could be akin to earlier Saxon but with Rick Springfield on vocals. Check out “Paths of Heart” or “Caught in the Wind”.

Some attention should be given to Rick Lazaroff's bass playing. Having strong jazz influences, Lazaroff doesn't fully stretch out here but does pack in some rock solid bass playing that stands out enough to catch attention in several places.

Overall, the trademark sound of Santers’ debut, and indeed their next two albums, is hard rock guitar with vocals that likely appealed to young ladies of the time. I mean the girls that wanted the excitement of hard rock without the overt sexuality of Motley Crue. Some very good solos and strong songs. But not for those who can’t take nice boy hard rock.

voila_la_scorie Mark Santers has such a nice guy voice that it's not easy to believe he sang in a hard rock band. Even when he sings about drinking all night and sleeping it off all day, he doesn't sound like he really means it. His voice has no bite, no edge, though he can sing well enough. It's the one aspect of the Santers sound that seems too upper middle class finished-my-homework nice-boy-next-door to be really hard rock. Mark Santers would come to your house in a suit and with flowers to pick up your daughter and he would bring her home at ten o'clock and walk her to the door, thanking her for a very nice time.

Santers, comprised of brothers Rick and Mark Santers (guitar/vocals and drums/vocals respectively) and bassist Rick Lazaroff, was a hard rock act out of Ontario that released three albums in the early eighties and recorded a fourth that wasn't released until 1998. Musically, on the first three albums, the band performed fairly straight ahead hard rock with some peri-trad-metal (peripheral traditional metal?) songs. Hey, in the early eighties, the distinctions between different sub-genres of metal had yet to have been established. Santers tread the waters somewhere between Coney Hatch and Saxon. On this, their second album, I even find a place or two where if Bruce Dickenson could have taken over the mic, the band could have been a younger brother to some classic band that was not quite like Iron Maiden.

The first track “Mistreatin' Heart” aims for the charts it seems as the keyboard inclusion (a rare thing on the first three albums) makes Santers sound closer to compatriots Harlequin who had a keyboard player in the line-up and mostly sit on the pop hard rock side of the fence. But the second track “Mystical Eyes” stays hard rock until the instrumental part around the guitar solo. Here we wander into NWoBHM territory a little.

“Still I Am” is the most melodic track on the album. With acoustic guitar and electric, it's track almost pretty enough to take home to mom (in the eighties that is; these days moms might have actually been a fan of the band back in '83). The album continues to deliver mostly serious hard rock with some feel good moments as well as some heavier and more serious moments. Songs like “Road to Morocco”, “Winter Freeze” and “Hard Time Lovin' You” show the band's harder edge while “Back Streets” goes more for the mainstream. There are very few keyboards on this album and basically we have the power trio of drums, bass, and hard rock guitar. If Biff Byford of Saxon could have taken the vocals on the title track it wouldn't have been out of place on an early eighties Saxon album.

I guess Rick Santers' voice just sounds too clean and too AOR to really be bad ass. When he sings “Where no one can find me / Well I found myself / Looking for heaven / I just found my hell” I almost thought I heard “I just found my health”. And that sounds too much like a good boy. Thankfully, it is hell he found. Thankfully for us. The music rocks pretty decently. Mark just needs to go without a shave for a few days and he needs to chew some beef jerky and have a whisky.